Challenging English

 
Taiwan is an interesting place to live. That's the understatement of the ... blog, so far.

One of the more curious aspects of living here is the poor English ability of the locals - I'm not talking about academics, people working at schools, business people etc. Unlike Thailand, Bali and - of course - Singapore and Hong Kong, the average "man on the street" here is usually incapable and certainly unwilling to try and speak English. This is strange in a country that appears to worship the US and seems to want to mimic it in every conceivable way. We have HBO and Cinemax, Miller Draft and Marlboro Lights. And while Fords, Chryslers and Buicks roam the roads, F16s patrol the skies. It's a sort of strange paradox - a nation desperate to emulate another and yet, almost spitefully, unwilling to try and speak like him.

Look, don't get me wrong. If Taiwanese people choose this way, that's okay. It's certainly forced me to speak Mandarin in taxis and 7 Elevens, in supermarkets and pubs. And once in a post office, where I forgot the word for aeroplane, and tried to send my sister's stuff to South Africa by tomato.

So, in this environment, one is constantly confronted by amusing spelling errors and confusing mispronunciations: Rappers become rapers, walkers are wankers, beaches are bitches and amazingly, cement can sound like semen.   

These mistakes cause amusement and sometimes a little embarrassment. Over at You Don't Say, however,  John McIntyre has the following comments on a typo that cost $18 000.

Penguin Group Australia is pulping 7,000 copies of The Pasta Bible cookbook because the recipe for tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto called for sprinkling the dish with “salt and freshly ground black people.”

How people came to be substituted for pepper was not announced. It is not at all uncommon for the wrong synapse to fire in a writer’s brain, particularly when concentration is momentarily relaxed, substituting the wrong word for the correct word. Some errors are the result of a category called a cupertino, in which the electronic spell-check function does not recognize a typed word and substitutes the one most nearly resembling it in its dictionary file.

Then, of course, comes the embarrassment of the proofreader, who let this mistake slip through his or her hands. Once again, if attention flags even momentarily, the brain is given to pass quickly over words it recognizes. The wrong word correctly spelled is one of the great hazards that editors and proofreaders encounter.

You may snicker, but you too could have committed this error, or overlooked it. So could I. So could anyone.

 I'm not bothering to check for typos today...